MOUNT SHASTA, A Photo Novella for the Internet:

We don't see them much in the United States, but elsewhere in the world there is a long standing tradition of romance and adventure stories told with captioned, still photographs in magazine or comic book format; an early relative of the contemporary Graphic Novel. This long planned Photo Novella, MOUNT SHASTA, began to make its way on to the Internet in 2000.

Video streaming in those days was awful, with postage stamp sized, pixelated resolution and almost inaudible distorted sound, so it was decided to use Macromedia Flash, divide the work into Pages and Chapters and deliver it as a sort of "Chapter Serial".
Using Flash and a little bit of simple scripting, it was possible to get a following section or "Page" to preload in the background as each Page played. People with 56k, dial-up connections to the Internet were able to get this project to play well and at 640 x 480, television-like quality. I even received a treasured "pat-on-the-back" email from the young god of Flash animation design, Hillman Curtis

The first 3 Chapters were posted page-by-page on the old website in 2000.

Virtually all of the time available to me for art work (after working full time for money) was sucked up by the endless scanning, manipulating
images and building these Flash files.
Obviously I would have done everything in digital photography if were doing it today, but in 1999, a 3-megapixel digital camera cost $4000 with a crappy plastic lens. I was able to afford a $250 Pentax 35mm (film) camera, process color film cheaply at the drugstore, scan it using an HP PhotoSmart S20 film scanner (cost about the same as the camera). All those individual files were then run through PhotoShop
for cropping and color manipulation and then into Flash.

I know, I know... today we just do it all with our phone and plop it onto YouTube.

The actual climb took place in September of 2001 (the weekend before September 11th) and the work was completed at the end of 2001. There's a link to the Photo Novella HERE and on the menu above.

I am posting a few sample images from the very first pages that went online, here:

(Clicking on the image will enlarge it in a new JavaScript Popup window.)

The other thing I was working on in 2000 was preparation for the upcoming Sonsbeek 9 International Sculpture exhibition in Arnhem, Netherlands; scheduled for June of 2001.
Several 3D models were constructed and I worked on images and drawings.
The first of these images below shows the initial presentation image (which actually got me the project) that I made using the "Age of Empires"
game editor. The 3D model is just a sheet of foam core cut in a spiral of Fermat pattern, then carefully pushed through from underneath to make the extrusion.

Peter Santino
February 15, 2015
Background photo on this page is of the model for "All Happy Now" planned for Sonsbeek 9.